Thursday, August 18, 2005
Some folks would like to bring wild elephants, lions and cheetahs to the American plains.
National Geographic: Lions, Elephants to Roam the U.S. Plains?
We talk about horses and camels. Horses and camels originated in North America, and there were multiple species here 13,000 years ago. Currently, there are European horses in many landscapes in America, but they're often viewed as pests. We argue that they could be used as analogs for the Pleistocene horses that were once roaming North America, as can the camels.
Then moving on to potential conflict, let's talk about the cheetah. The pronghorn [an antelopelike animal in the western U.S.] almost certainly evolved the way it did due to predation by the American cheetah. The American cheetah is closely related to the African cheetah.
So one can argue, What would be the benefits of introducing the African cheetah back to the American landscape? It could restore those lost interactions between the pronghorn and the cheetah, and at the same time help to halt the extinction of the African cheetah, which is highly endangered and very likely will face extinction in the next century...
...This all has to be research driven, done one step at a time. Because there are some huge obstacles to talking about reintroducing large predators, like lions. So there's going to have to be a fairly substantial attitude shift that comes along with this vision, for the public...
Yeah, like maybe we'll just have to get used to being eaten or trampled from time to time -- all for the sake of re-introducing creatures that were never "introduced" in the first place (the species are all "sorta similar" to types that were here in ancient times).
I dunno. Good luck to them, but maybe history and nature have moved on.
In Conquistador (S.M. Stirling) the observation is made that the real world Great Plains of North America are rather lacking in major predators, even with humans around. And that such as lions could be introduced without upsetting things too badly. Since the same holds true in the 'New World' the colonists from the story's mainline Earth import lions from the new world's version of Africa.
(I think that's clear.)